Description
Size A3
Bryan Ferry Roxy Music Chelsea Embankment 1993.
Open Ended Fine Art Prints.
Signed
Bryan Ferry — Chelsea Embankment, London, 1993
This photograph of Bryan Ferry was taken on Chelsea Embankment in London in 1993 for The Independent Magazine.
I shot it using Polaroid Polygraph 400 ASA instant film, which I absolutely loved. It had a beautiful grain to it. There was quite a process involved in getting the final photograph, though.
You could process the Polagraph through a machine supplied by Polaroid. And when I say supplied, I mean supplied at a cost — nothing was ever actually free!
The film itself was beautiful but incredibly delicate, so once you’d processed it, you had to choose the image you wanted to use and mount it into a 35mm frame.
Then, phew, it went through another Polaroid machine, which transferred the image onto Polaroid Type 55.
The reason for doing all that?
Type 55 gave you a black-and-white negative that you could then print from.
It sounds complicated now, but I did a lot of this sort of thing back in the day. There was something organic about the whole process. You were physically handling the image at every stage, making decisions as you went along.
And, of course, there had to be something go wrong.
On this particular day, the shutter on my Hasselblad 150mm lens decided to go sideways, which really pissed me off.
I was left shooting on 35mm instead.
Which is one of those moments where you have a choice: spend the rest of the day swearing at the equipment, or get on with the job.
Looking back, I’m rather glad I did.
The photograph has that lovely, slightly tactile quality that those old instant materials could produce. It doesn’t feel overly polished or clinical. It feels like a photograph that was actually made — because, in a very literal sense, it was.
I did a lot of this kind of work in those days, and I still love the physicality of it.
Film, chemicals, machines, frames, negatives, bits of kit breaking at exactly the wrong moment…
And somehow, out of all that, you ended up with a photograph.
I miss that.
Although I could have done without the effin Hasselblad breakdown.
Please note that the paper size is always larger than the printed image.Info here.
